April 09, 2010

Spring Fashion Events around NYC

April 09, 2010/ Francesca Granata

Jane Fonda in Klute

by Sarah Scaturro

This spring there are a lot of events occurring around NYC with fashion as the main focus. Here is a breakdown of the ones that I’ve been able to find, and they are all free! Please leave a comment if I've left anything out.

April 9th - Richard Martin Visual Culture Symposium Tonight is the Annual Richard Martin Visual Culture Symposium at NYU, which allows the graduating students of the Visual Culture MA program to lecture on their thesis topic. Worn Through has a breakdown of the topics and schedule.

April 13th, 20th and 27th – Fashion In Film: New York City The brand new MA program in Fashion Studies at Parsons The New School for Design is hosting a fashion in film series for the entire month of April. Curated by Jeffrey Lieber, Assistant Professor of Visual Culture Studies, the series has some fashion classics - Annie Hall and Sabrina - but also some lesser-known films with impressive fashions, such as Klute (Jane Fonda) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Barbara Streisand).

April 15th – 16th Bard Graduate Center Annual Symposium Bard Graduate Center is having their annual symposium on April 15-16th on the topic of Secondhand Culture: Waste, Value, and Materiality. I can’t wait for to hear Senior Curator of Costume at the ROM Alexandra Palmer speak on “Back to Back: Retro-fitting Fashion within the Museum.” There will also be a screening of the film “Secondhand.”

April 19th – Anna Wintour Lecture According to NY MAG Anna Wintour is giving a free lecture on the 19th at 6 pm at Pratt Institute.

April 22nd – FIT’s 4th Annual Sustainable Business & Design conference This year’s theme is Redesigning for a Sustainable Future. Go here for more information.

April 27th – Mannequins in the Museum: Perspectives on Curating Fashion The lecture I’m most excited for is by Joanne Dolan Ingersoll, a truly talented curator from RISD. She will be giving a lecture for SVA’s Design Criticism MFA lecture series on a topic I have great interest in due to my work: “Mannequins in the Museum: Perspectives on Curating Fashion.”

April 29th – Predicting Color Trends in Fashion FIT is hosting the seriously hardworking historian Reggie Blaszczyk on April 29th when she’ll give a lecture on the history of predicting color trends. I was fortunate enough to meet her at the Business History conference last year in Milan - I had just read her article on Dorothy Liebes called “Designing Synthetics, Building Brands” in the Journal of Design History. As someone who studies synthetics and has handled Liebes’ textiles, the article about blew my mind.

May 4th – Towards Sustainable Fashion Symposium In conjunction with the Scandinavian House’s Eco-Chic exhibition, there will be a panel discussion featuring Marcus Bergman, Karin Stenmar, Sass Brown and Eviana Hartman, and moderated by Hazel Clark, Dean of the School of Art and Design and Theory, Parsons: The New School for Design.

May 8th – FIT’s Annual Fashion and Textiles Symposium This year’s topic for FIT’s Annual Fashion and Textiles Symposium on May 8th sounds great - Americans in Paris: Designers, Buyers, Editors, Photographers, Models, and Clients in Paris Fashion.

May 21st and 22nd - Costume Collections: A Collaborative Model for Museums The Brooklyn Museum and the Costume Institute are hosting a 2-day symposium about their new costume collaboration. I’m looking forward to seeing both exhibitions this spring!

March 16, 2010

Entangled Global Patterns of Cultural Identity

March 16, 2010/ Francesca Granata

by Patty Chang

Yinka Shonibare, Three Graces.

Textile patterns and dress provide a rich visual vocabulary of encoded information and aesthetic expression. They have the ability to exploit or subvert the commercial allure of the “exotic”, and how it is called upon to reference cultural or national identities or even recast the vernacular. The exhibition Pattern ID, which is currently on view at the Akron Art Museum, queries just how straight forward patterns and dress inform our understanding of cultural identities. The multimedia exhibition entitled, Pattern ID, features the works of Mark Bradford, iona rozeal brown, Nick Cave, Willie Cole, Lalla Essaydi, Samuel Fosso, James Gobel, Brian Jungen, Bharti Kher, Takashi Murakami, Grace Ndiritu, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Mickalene Thomas, Aya Uekawa, and Kehinde Wiley. Many of these contemporary artists have migrated from one culture to another, be it national, ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, political or religious. Rather than trade one identity for another, the artists reveal ways in which identity can be cumulative, employing a patchwork of textile patterns and dress as meaningful vehicles to locate one’s place in society against a backdrop of globalization. Taking a range of approaches from humor to irony and formal beauty, these artists borrow from popular culture, world history, and art history to transform and redefine the cultural meanings of patterns.

For instance, the use of African textiles as props and backdrops in the works of Yinka Shonibare, Samuel Fosso, and Grace Ndiritu play not only on traditional and modern forms of representation, but also on cultural myths, politics, and ideas of post-colonialism, reclamation, and subjugation. The headless mannequins in Shonibare’s Three Graces fashioned in elaborate Victorian garb made out of atypical ‘African’ fabrics and arranged as a tableau satirizes the notions of authenticity and identity. The installation relies as much on the Dutch wax-print cloth ‘ethnicizing’ the space as on the references to 18th and 19th century masterpieces of European art. However, it is the textile that is a testament to cross-cultural interactions brought about by mercantile trade, having undergone a series of replication, transformations, redefinitions, and repackaging for different markets and tastes. Although linked by ideas of post-colonialism and identity, his works are not necessarily contained by them.

Grace Ndiritu, Still Life

Similarly, Samuel Fosso’s photograph Le Chef: celui qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons (The Chief: The One Who Sold Africa to the Colonizers) is part of a series of self-portraits created in 1997 for the Parisian department store Tati, that depict the photographer in little else other than leopard skins, holding sunflowers, and draped in gold jewelry seated against a backdrop and foreground of Dutch wax-print fabrics. The contrasting patterns form a subversive portrait of corrupt African leadership and the regalia of indigenous kingship. The camp imagery deliberately projects an ‘exotic' Africa as the world sees it. Moreover, Grace Ndiritu’s Still Life depicts four video installations inspired by Matisse and his love for the female nudes and African textiles. Inverting the colonial gaze, she transforms the female nude from a passive decorative object into an active subject. The African textiles wrapped and draped around her models are used to elicit countervailing emotional stereotypes of repression and sexual freedom.

Samuel Fosso, Le Chef: celui qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons

Elsewhere in the exhibit Aya Uekawa and Kehinde Wiley incorporate highly stylized decorative pattern motifs within their portraits, while also referencing the realism of Dutch and Flemish 16th and 17th century painters, and the styles of European portraitists such as Reynolds, Gainsborough and Titian, respectively. Although Wiley has used models in the past from West Africa, he mainly works with African-American models as a symbol of hybridization and globalization through the African diaspora. In many instances, cultural identity is lifted out of its traditional anchoring in a particular locality and redefined in a hybrid context that is still coherent and intensely beautiful. One of my personal favorites is the variation of Soundsuits by Nick Cave, who created elaborate costumes out of fiber textiles and found objects to be worn by dancers as a vehicle for sound and movement. The suits have an ethereal quality reminiscent of a fusion of Leigh Bowery’s performance pieces and certain body-hiding masks and ceremonial costumes from African, South Pacific, and Caribbean cultures.

Nick Cave, Soundsuits, Installation View, Akron Art Museum.

One of the major divides on globalization today is whether the increased speed, scale and volume of international trade is imposing cultural homogenization or in fact, working to enrich and preserve culture through expanded access to the internet and increased cross-cultural contact. Interestingly, many of the works featured in this exhibition assert a more complex, multivalent understanding of our contemporary condition, namely one that takes into account hybrid forms of cultural expressions that are not entirely global or local, indigenous or imported, or Western or non-Western. As historian Benedict Anderson suggests, a passport may come to signify permission to work someplace more than a connection to any essential collective identity or pledge of national allegiance.

Nick Cave, Soundsuits

*Pattern ID: International Artists Fashion their Global Identities is on view at the Akron Art Museum through May 9, 2010.

March 15, 2010

Fashion at Large

March 15, 2010/ Francesca Granata

We are pleased to announce a new regular contributor to Fashion Projects: Rizvana Bradley is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Literature Program at Duke University. She is working to develop a variety of critical approaches to fashion and contemporary design, focusing on the ways in which technology is integrated into various artistic practices. Putting fashion in dialogue with the arts at large, her work also touches on video art, dance, architecture, and concept clothing. She has taught courses at Duke University that foreground fashion as a singular artistic practice specifically placing it at the critical intersection of current discussions about art, media and the body. Her writing has appeared in Hint Magazine. Look for her interviews, general coverage of lectures and exhibits, as well as other pieces for Fashion Projects.

March 10, 2010

Fashion+Film The 1960s Revisited

March 10, 2010/ Francesca Granata

Still from Michelangelo Antonioni Blow Up.

Opening this Friday at the James Gallery of the CUNY Graduate Center is an exhibition on Film and Fashion, which celebrates the symbiotic relation the two enjoyed in the 1960s. Titled "Fashion+Film The 1960s Revisited," the exhibition, which is curated by CUNY's Professor Eugenia Paulicelli, is comprised of dress, photographs, and costume designers’ sketches, as well as screenings of film and TV commercials from the decade.

In concert with the exhibition, is a symposium taking place this Friday the 12th. The symposium, which brings together fashion and film academics with costume designers, will explore the impact these two culture industries had on the construction of individual and collective identities, with a particular focus on fashion and film of the 1960s.

Below is the symposium's full schedule

Welcome & Opening remarks

• CUNY, Center for the Humanities • Louise Wallenberg, University of Stockholm • Eugenia Paulicelli, CUNY, The Graduate Center

10.10-10:40

• Adriana Berselli, “Working with Antonioni in L’Avventura and Costume Designing for Film” Q/A, Moderated by Eugenia Paulicelli

10:40- 12:25

Session 1/The Fabric of Film, Fashion and Design

• Sam Rohdie, University of Central Florida, “Hitchcock’s Fabric” • Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh, “Consuming Fashion: Revisioning the 1960s’ Economic Miracle in 1960s Italian Cinema” • Emily Braun, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Making Waves: Balla, Pucci and Marine Fantasy in the 1960s” • Q/A, Moderated by Pat Kirkham, Bard Graduate Center

12:25-1:25/Lunch Break

1:30-3:15

Session 2/Fashioning Urban Space, Cities and Modernity

• Astrid Söderbergh Widding, University of Stockholm, “Fashion Apart: Godard and Fageol in 1960s Paris” • Vincenzo Maggitti, University of Stockholm, “Blow up: Looking beyond Visibility in the Cult Decade of the 1960s” • Eugenia Paulicelli, Queens College and The Graduate Center, “Rome: City of Film, City of Fashion” • Q/A, Moderated by Stella Bruzzi, University of Warwick

3.15-3:30

Coffee Break

3:30-5:15

Session 3/Dress and Masculinity in Film

• Stella Bruzzi, University of Warwick, “Seduced by Beige Slacks: The Fashionable Perversities of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema” • Paola Colaiacomo, IUAV, University of Venice, “Poets and Clerks: Male Physicality from Accattone to La prima linea” • Louise Wallenberg, University of Stockholm, “MAGO’s Magic: Fashioning Sexual (In)difference in the Swedish Cinema of the 1960s” • Q/A, Moderated by Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh

5:15- 6:30

Session 4/Rethinking the 1960s: Stars, Design and Fashion Nostalgia • Pat Kirkham and Marilyn Cohen, Bard Graduate Center and Cooper Hewitt, “Breakfast at Tiffany's: Fashion, France, Costume and Class” • Sonya Topolnisky, Bard Graduate Center, “The Mad Men Look: How Mad Men defines 1960s Style” • Q /A, Moderated by Louise Wallenberg, University of Stockholm

Co-sponsors: The Center for Fashion Studies, University of Stockholm; The Center for the Humanities, Concentration in Fashion Studies, Women’s Studies Certificate Program, Film Studies, CLAGS, The Italian Specialization at The CUNY Graduate Center.